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Family Circus, 5/6/14

If there’s one thing we know about Billy Keane, it’s that he hates learning things. Attempts to get him up to the base knowledge of knowledge necessary for being a functioning member of society have inspired in him a range of emotions running form smoldering anger to haughty contempt. But today we see that resisting all forms of intellectual advancement is just straight-up exhausting. When will Billy get to stop fighting with the chance to learn something about the world outside himself? When will they just let him wallow in his own ignorance? How much more of this do you expect him to take?

Six Chix, 5/6/14

I’ve always thought it would be a good real estate strategy to check out houses where high-profile murders or other horrible things took place, since I’m not superstitious about that sort of thing but a lot of people are, and it seems like I could get a good deal, maybe. Like, for instance, a house where a couple of children were killed and eaten! That’s what happened here, right? Because the kids in the Hansel and Gretel story killed the witch, so this is clearly an alternate scenario, but there’s no way everyone survived. Those kids were stone-cold killers. It was eat or be eaten. What I’m saying is that from a real estate perspective, that’s a much bigger problem than just the lack of candy attached to the outside of the house. The candy was probably attracting rats anyway, let’s be honest.

Mark Trail, 5/6/14

i don’t mean to frighten you

than normal bears

PURE POETRY

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Six Chix, 5/2/14

If you’re an wealthy older guy with unruly clown-like hair and you manage to convince a younger woman to marry you, most people would be convinced you’re only after one thing. But the truth is that you’re probably also interested in a having a gracious hostess to help you throw all the black-tie dinner parties that are crucial to your social position. So yeah, I totally get why this guy is so furious that his wife has deliberately misconstrued his urging that she be more social and has chosen to publicly embarrass him in this way. This is a totally relatable comic that encapsulates the kind of thing that happens to real people all the time!

Blondie, 5/2/14

Well, technically, Dagwood, if you subscribe to the auteur theory, Francis Ford Coppola made The Godfather; or, if you prefer to think of filmmaking as a collaborative, industrial process, you could blame producer Albert S. Ruddy and Paramount Pictures. Also, whoever made the movie, they made it in 1972. That was 42 years ago! So it’s a good thing Blondie got this joke in while it’s still a hot topic.

Spider-Man, 5/2/14

Wait, Robbie and JJJ think people like Spider-Man? Oh, man, we could have all saved a lot of trouble if this misunderstanding had been cleared up earlier.

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Mary Worth, 4/15/14

Last week Wilbur urged Iris to apply tough love to her layabout drug dealing son who may or may not be working hard to find a job (a task which, for the record, is often quite difficult for ex-cons), and she blew up at him about it, putting Wilbur’s sad love life in jeopardy. But ever since then, Iris has been musing about whether maybe she should be harder on Tommy. And who’s there to swoop in and catch her at the moment she’s ready to speak these uncomfortable truths aloud? Wilbur? Don’t be ridiculous. It’s Mary. Mary’s been watching her from afar all this time, patiently waiting for the moment when Iris is ready to split at the seams, when she can turn Iris to her way of thinking with just an innocent, nonspecific question. This right here is a meddling master class. Run along and write your little advice column, Wilbur; the pros are working here.

Dick Tracy, 4/15/14

So God bless the new Dick Tracy creative team for the great art and reverence for comics history and all, but sometimes the plot gets so reverent of comics history that it’s literally impossible for anyone but comics obsessives to follow. At the moment, for instance, the strip is switching back and forth between what appears to be a search for Little Orphan Annie, a followup to an earlier plotline that references characters and scenarios from the strip’s loopy sci-fi era of the 1960s and 1970s, and a fictionalized take on intra-comics industry feuding that started in 1942. Anyway, I’m just glad today’s strip sticks to the core Dick Tracy brand of Dick being a remorseless killer. “Soooo … these guys went out into deep space and … probably suffocated in terror?” “It looks that way, Diet,” Dick nods, satisfied.

Six Chix, 4/15/14

Six Chix appears to be using the week leading up to Easter to feature a a series cartoons about the birth and death of bunnies, with each strip guaranteed to disturb and unsettle! Anyway, all I’m going to do with this one is give you the phrase “rabbit cloaca” and rest easy in the knowledge that you won’t be able to extract it from your mind for days.

Beetle Bailey, 4/15/14

I spent a long time staring at this Beetle Bailey cartoon and trying to figure out what it meant. Then I realized I should follow Plato’s lead, which is to say: recognize it as inane nonsense, and wander off to find something better to do.